Users have an ever-increasing selection of media content to choose from that is available for consumption, such as music, photographs, videos, and other media assets. Additionally, a typical user may have several different devices on which media assets can be consumed, such as a desktop computer, a laptop computer, and a smart phone, and each particular device can store a different collection of the various types of media assets. Thus, a user may have several different collections of media assets distributed over multiple different devices.
Situations can arise when a user wants to access a particular media asset that is stored on a device, but the user may not have immediate access to the device. For example, a user may be utilizing a smart phone at a location away from home and wants to play a song that is stored on a desktop computer at the user's home. Typical ways of locating and retrieving the song for playback on the smart phone can be cumbersome and require a large amount of bandwidth. Thus, the user may spend a great deal of time transferring a media asset from the desktop computer to the smart phone, or the user may simply forego retrieving the media asset.